While correlation is not causation, I think it is interesting that the top ranked cities for creativity all have extremely tolerant attitudes toward marijuana use. According to the Richard Florida in his new book, The Rise of the Creative Class–Revisited: 10th Anniversary Edition, the most creative city in America is Boulder, Colorado. In second place is San Francisco, California. These are arguably two of the most weed friendly cities in America.

Similarly, among non-American locations Florida ranked Amsterdam in the Netherlands as the most creative city. Amsterdam is well known for its marijuana coffee shops and effectively having marijuana be defacto legal for decades.

I’m not trying to claim marijuana use is what made these cities creative, but I think it does perfectly highlight a point I have previously made about the Netherlands. It again shows that tolerating marijuana use doesn’t do any significant damage to a society. Being very tolerant towards cannabis use clearly hasn’t prevented these cities from being extremely prosperous, innovative, successful, and desirable places to live.

Technically the supposed justification for our marijuana prohibition is that its use is so dangerous to society we must criminalize it. Not only has prohibition failed to stop people from using marijuana given that the United States actually has higher rates of use than the Netherlands; but also there is no evidence that places that tolerate marijuana use are hurt by this in any significant way.

Dick Florida and his “creative class” thesis is pure non-sense. It is another variant of the Bohemian Bourgeois thesis cooked up by David Brooks around the same time. Of course, weed should be legalized. But don’t use the ideology of middle brow middle managers huckstering for the chamber of commerce as evidence of this fact.

Also, notice the class dynamics at work here. Marijuana should be legalized for people and places that aren’t particularly creative and cool or bourgeois for the simple reason that criminalization does far more harm than even over using the substance itself. Poor urban people in public housing and poor rural people in double wides are more likely to face the repressive arm of the state as a consequence of the war on drugs. The “creative” bobos in Frisco and Boulder smoking high quality weed simply aren’t as oppressed by the war on drugs in the first place. For example, in Chicago, the white and affluent “creative class” neighborhoods of the near north side have 1/13 the arrest rate for possession of weed that the mostly working class and black/brown neighborhoods of the South and West side. Even as usage rates of marijuana are very similar across these groups.

“It again shows that tolerating marijuana use doesn’t do any significant damage to a society. Being very tolerant towards cannabis use clearly hasn’t prevented these cities from being extremely prosperous, innovative, successful, and desirable places to live.”

That is correct. Same can be said for the Bay Area in CA and Boulder in CO as you note. And yet with the myriad of criminal misbehavior issues plaguing this nation, especially financial ones that could best use federal intervention and resources, the feds under both Democrat and Republican administrations feel the need to hassle state law compliant dispensaries. Glad to know they have their priorities in order.

The more striking, important and, to me, obvious conclusion from the lists is these cities exist in blue states. Not only blue but they are out front and leading in states with high minimum wage laws, in healthcare, in quality of life, etc as well. And the non-American cities have Medicare For All type of medical delivery systems. High taxes, too. People who are the creatives, per se, aren’t looking for cheap as much as they are looking for value. And that is not found in The South, cheap is. Red states are cheap and cheesy and lead the way in franchise type of enterprises which are the exact opposite of creative. I’d like to add that Portland, Oregon should be on this list, again, as it was a decade ago. And I think Albuquerque, N. Mexico has the chance to become an oasis of creativity in the desert that is Texas and Arizona. But the West Coast and the college towns of the Rockies deliver a quality of life that is very appealing to all thinking folks, and not just as the cradles for the creatives.

Don’t go shouting from the rooftops that Amsterdam is so cool towards weed that it is almost legal there. Dutch politics are tending to the right, and there are plans to make weed passports required. That is to say you can only buy weed in a coffeshop when you’re registered there AND a citizen of Amsterdam, mutatis mutandis every other city in the Netherlands.

And yes, I know, that will encourage BIG CRIME to take over the weed market. Perhaps that is the intention of rightwing politicians; gangsters tend to be extreme right in their political convictions, aren’t they?